A botanical garden repeat... Today we repeated a day we had last week, at the Hawai'i Tropical Botanical Gardens. It wasn't completely a repeat, however, because many different things were in bloom this week. The day could hardly have been more perfect for a walk like this: in the 70s, overcast (which makes good lighting for both viewing and photography), and uncrowded (mainly because we were the first people there, right as they opened). Debbie was stoked because she did so much better on this walk than on the previous walk last week – she has gained a lot of strength during our vacation simply because she's been walking a lot more.

Before going to the gardens, we stopped at Cafe 100, as planned, for breakfast. I had a “breakfast plate” with grilled ham, rice, and two eggs over easy. Debbie had a “Portuguese sausage loco” – rice, brown gravy, Portuguese sausages, and an egg over easy. Both were excellent. After our trip to the gardens, we went to Suisan for poke, also as planned. We were a bit surprised upon entering the store, though, because most of the poke trays were completely empty! Fortunately we found some kinds that we liked still remaining, and we ended up having our last delicious poke meal in Richardson's park. We didn't see any whales breaching today, though I did see an enormous Samoan guy surfing – and when he fell at the end of his run, it was close enough to a whale breaching! After we finished our poke, we still had a couple hours of daylight left, so we drove around a bit on the Hamakua coast. This is a bit of an odd experience for us, because we still remember well the days when this was all sugar cane country, with beautiful rolling fields of sugar cane set against a background of blue ocean and sky. We were driving need Pepeekeo, a town that used to be centered around a sugar cane processing plant whose ruins are still there. We remembered a field here with a beautiful old banyan tree in it, and a road so that the locals could use it as a picnic spot. We took my mom and dad there to see that tree, some 25 years ago. We found a road named “Banyan Tree Road” in the right spot, but not a trace of that grand old tree or the sugar cane fields that surrounded it. On the other hand, the development of the area in the past 25 years is much less homogeneous than it used to be – we passed housing developments, pulp trees, sorghum (why?), papaya orchards, macadamia orchards, vegetable fields – all kinds of things, many quite beautiful in their own right. But our memories still fight for our affections. We also spotted a new bird for us: the nutmeg manikin.

The first photo below is from a plant right at the garden's entrance. It has the strangest-colored blossoms we have ever seen (and last week it wasn't in bloom at all!). The rest of the photos are from within the garden...